Going Up! (8 page)

H
E
WAS
not so sure though as he hurried into his building and realized it was, oh hell! Nine forty-five. God, let Sean still be awake, please let him be still awake, please let him be….

Sitting on the bench next to the elevator, wearing yoga pants and a long-sleeved baseball shirt, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed.

Zach had to draw a little nearer, just to make sure it was him.

“Sean?” he said softly, and Sean’s eyes remained closed but the corners of his mouth turned up.

“Someone had a late night,” he murmured.

“I didn’t even make it to the gym.”

Sean’s eyes opened, and he regarded Zach from only a few inches distance. “What happened?”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Zach told him. He placed a very careful kiss on Sean’s cheek. “Right now, do you want to come up and… uhm… I’ve got movies! Or, uhm, a soda. Or… coffee. I’ve got coffee and biscotti! Or….”

“Sex, Zach,” Sean said soberly. “I think we can skip the preliminaries. We need to have sex.”

Zach felt color wash his face. “Maybe more kissing lessons,” he said, hoping. “And, you know. Phone numbers?”

Sean’s eyes narrowed wickedly. “Okay. That’s a deal. Phone numbers in the elevator. Kissing lessons in the living room. Sex in the bedroom. We’ve got this locked. Now let me up, and we can make it happen.”

Zach backed up and offered him a hand, and Sean took it—and used the leverage to launch himself at Zach. Their mouths met, melded, and time ceased to exist, as did the rules of physics.

The elevator dinged, and Sean steered them inside, pressed the button for floor thirty, and the kiss went on.

Z
ACH
DIDN
’
T
see if there were people in that elevator or not. Everything was a haze except Sean’s mouth on his, and the quietly murmured instructions.

“It’s a dialog,” Sean said. “See?” He pressed his mouth against Zach’s and Zach opened in response. Sean pulled back and breathed, “Good, now listen to this next one.” And then he touched his tongue to the edge of Zach’s lips and Zach drove his tongue into Sean’s mouth like a deep-core drill trying to strike oil.

Zach half expected Sean to correct his form or punctuate his tongue work or something but Sean went boneless in his arms, opened his mouth, and melted against the back of the elevator. Zach tasted
everything—
tongue, teeth, tonsils—and then pulled back, touched Sean’s lips and then moved in a little deeper and then accepted the quest of his tongue and sucked on it gently and released it and teased his lips some more. There was no coming up for air, there was only Sean, who tasted like coffee and magic and unicorns and knights in geeky armor and some sort of gravy he’d had for dinner.

Sean’s hands slid down the back of Zach’s slacks and squeezed, and Zach whimpered and buried his face in Sean’s neck.

“Lesson over,” Sean whispered. “You kiss like a Shakespeare sonnet.”

“It’s not dialog,” Zach apologized.

“Nope.” Sean’s hands were squeezy and intimate on Zach’s backside. “‘Sheer poetry, ah!’”

Zach shuddered, and while one hand was still clutching his briefcase, the other hand was sort of mauling its way under Sean’s shirt. “I have no idea what that means.”

Sean growled into Zach’s mouth and the kiss was on again, except this time Zach got a good handful of Sean’s backside, and it felt
so
good in his hand. Sean whined a little and ground up against Zach’s thigh, and Zach had a sudden flash of the obvious:
That’s his cock. And it’s getting hard. And I’m going to see it, and touch it, and taste it and ***!

Zach’s brain sort of shorted out after that, and his briefcase hit the floor. Now he had
two
handfuls of Sean’s ass, and that magic thing in the yoga pants was getting harder and grinding closer and—

Ding!

He couldn’t seem to stop kissing Sean.

“Zach…. Zach—”

A little smack on the top of his head snapped him out of it. He pulled back from Sean and they both regarded each other stupidly. Sean’s pupils were blown and his breath was coming like a sprinter’s at the line.

“Huh?” Zach said, looking around. Jace regarded him over Sean’s shoulder, his steel-blue eyes sardonic and unamused.

“If you two don’t get out of the elevator and down the hall, you’re going to get evicted for indecent exposure.”

“Jace!” Quent protested.

“Their hands are
still
in each other’s pants,” Jace snapped. “I’m doing them a service.” Then the irritated stockbroker turned back to Zach and literally grabbed him by the collar and pulled him back. “Get out your key, Romeo, and go kiss yourself an entire play—just do it
out of the elevator.
”

Zach grabbed his briefcase in embarrassment, and was fumbling around in his pocket for his key when Sean grabbed his arm and started hauling him down the hall. “Bye fellas!” he burbled. “Have a nice evening!”

“Not as nice as yours!” Quent called, and the last thing Zach heard as he opened his door was Jace growling, “Wanna bet?”

Sean chuckled and the two of them fell through the door and the rest of the world was forgotten.

Sean—oh wow. Taste and taste and taste and it didn’t get old or awkward or weird, it was just… kissing him was like eating chocolate and raspberries—it shouldn’t have to stop. And Sean’s hands—his presumptuous, forward, filthy-minded hands!

First they were fumbling with Zach’s fly, then they were pushing his slacks down to his thighs and then they were shoving his suit jacket off his shoulders and, between kisses, nibbles, breathless little cries, unbuttoning his shirt.

Zach managed to pull back and gasp, “The bedroom. There’s condoms in the bedroom.”

Sean pulled back and looked at him suspiciously. “Yeah, Zach, but how
old
are those condoms.”

Zach flushed. “I, uhm, bought them this week.”

“Cause the other ones were… c’mon. Fess up.”

Zach looked into that ordinary, beautiful, freckled face with the riot of hair and the windburned nose, and actually felt like he
could
fess up, to everything.

“Expired,” Zach mumbled, because it really had been that long since he’d even called up the escort service to allay the loneliness.

Sean nodded then, and kissed his forehead. “Okay then. A little slower. We’re going to do this a little slower.”

Zach whined and did his own filthy-minded exploration of Sean’s backside with his hands. “Fast first!” he begged. “Slower later!”

Sean reached behind him and grabbed Zach’s hands firmly, hauling them out of his pants and pinning them to Zach’s sides. “Go get undressed,” he ordered softly. “Down to wherever your courage fails you. Get the condoms out and ready on the dressing table, and the lube too, but don’t get too disappointed if we don’t get that far. You and me, we’re going to have us a long, meaningful body conversation tonight, and I have waited too long to rush it.”

Zach swallowed, some of his urgency fading. “Undress?”

“I’ll be right in,” Sean murmured, kissing him quickly.

Sean must have remembered where the guest bathroom was, because he disappeared in there, and Zach picked his jacket off the ground, left his briefcase where it was, and pulled his pants up so he could shuffle into his bedroom.

He felt a little better after he hung up his suit jacket and his pants, and he managed to unbutton his dress shirt and take off his tie without any nerves whatsoever.

But down to his tank—that’s where his nerves failed him, and while he managed to take it off with shaking hands, he was huddled under the comforter, looking balefully at the supplies on top of the nightstand when Sean came out of the bathroom.

Naked.

Zach stopped huddling, and actually propped himself on an elbow to check him out.

Sean grinned and gestured to himself suggestively. He didn’t work out—he had a little tummy, and his chest was narrow. He wasn’t fat—just soft—and Zach thought about how real he’d felt under Zach’s hands.

“See?” Sean said, still grinning. “One-hundred percent red-blooded gay man. Right here. No preservatives or additives, just—”

“Just you. Get in bed, okay? You promised me dialog.”

“Dialog?”

“Repartee, banter, an exchange of quips—”

“Oh hey! Look who’s getting all teacherly and shit!” Sean got close to the bed and reached down to feather his fingertips along Zach’s jaw. “Why are you so worried? You’re the one who’s buffed and toned and—”

Zach captured his hand. “Do you have any idea what you mean to me? How important you are? How much I need to touch someone who’s real?”

Sean knelt on the mattress and captured his mouth. Zach accepted the first sally, and replied. He listened with the opening of his mouth and his touches along Sean’s back, and replied with a leg thrown over a slender, naked thigh, and arching into Sean’s aroused body, so they could continue the conversation.

The dialog whispered when Sean kissed along his neck and down his chest, and exploded into babble when Sean’s swollen pink mouth closed around his nipple. When Sean’s soft hands pushed Zach’s boxers down his thighs and grasped Zach’s cock, they were no longer bantering; they were negotiating for the territory of Zach’s soul.

Sean’s mouth closed over Zach’s erect flesh, and Zach conceded the conversation with a shout, with begging, breathless sobs, broken syllables of raw need.

Sean responded with tenderness, with firm touches, with increased pressure where it was needed, and Zach ended the conversation, spilling his soul in his lover’s mouth.

Silence, hushed and reverent, filled the darkness.

Zach threaded shaking fingers through Sean’s hair, and Sean rested his cheek on Zach’s upper thigh and gazed up at him with sober eyes.

Sean captured Zach’s hand and squeezed.

“You didn’t… uhm, I mean, well….”

Sean shook his head then, squinting inscrutably. “We have so many more things to talk about,” he said quietly. “This conversation is going to take way longer than a night.”

Zach nodded and tried a shaky smile. His eyes burned absurdly and he closed them and returned the pressure of Sean’s fingers.

“Could you come up and kiss me, then?” he begged. “I… I don’t even know what to say anymore.”

“A kiss is good. I think kisses are where all good things start.”

Zach closed his eyes and accepted the kiss, accepted the taste of his come on Sean’s tongue, and all he had to return was that acceptance, that willingness to be himself and only himself for the man who had just made love to him in what had once been a cold and lonely bed.

The kiss ended, and Sean lay next to him, rubbing the hard muscles in his chest and the planes of his stomach. Zach took the tacit invitation and started to explore Sean’s body with tentative touches as well.

“That was wonderful,” Zach breathed, and Sean nodded.

“Your hands are still shaking.”

Zach’s hand stilled the tentative petting of the soft oblique muscle of Sean’s stomach. He watched curiously and saw that Sean was right.

“I’ve… it’s uhm….”

“Zach, you’re the loneliest person I’ve ever met.”

Zach shrunk in on himself in mortification. “I wasn’t a minute ago,” he muttered, trying to turn his back.

Sean stopped him with a quiet hand. “Come back here. C’mon, I won’t bite.” Zach rolled back and Sean opened his arms for him. Zach found himself cuddled up to that narrow chest with a few silky chest hairs peeping out, which Zach petted when Sean began to talk.

“My parents are still stupid sickly in love, you know,” Sean told him, and Zach didn’t even have to make listening noises, because suddenly, oh gift of gifts, Sean’s life story was spilled out before him like treasures for Zach to sort through.

His parents were still in love and living in Sacramento, and he had two younger sisters and a brother who was still in high school.

“They’re both retired, right? So Timothy gets dragged everywhere—I think he barely attends school, but his test scores are
phenomenal,
so he can go almost anywhere he wants. Of course, mom and dad can’t really afford anywhere, so it’s probably going to be state college, but he’ll do amazing, like he always does. And the girls are both getting their degrees in humanities and teaching, because it’s like, the family curse, you know? Some families do business, some are cops, ours are teachers. I picked middle school because I can teach almost anything, and I like being busy. So, every year we meet at home for Christmas, and my parents invite our significant others and we pick on each other and eat way too much and help mom with the dishes and tell her all about our personal lives and try not to let them give us money.”

“Sounds happy,” Zach whispered.

“We are. I missed them so bad when I went away to school. I called three times a week and about drove my mom crazy with e-mails and pictures. But eventually I really started to love it here, and I met Chris and Toby, and we all moved in together and then when my student loans ran out, we recruited Wendy, Katie, and Todd. And I dated a few guys for more than a month and partied a lot, and had just about decided I was ready to date like a grown-up when this really nice guy smiled at me on an elevator, and that was pretty much it.”

“Why?” Zach asked, thinking about the guy with the play tickets in a hurry. “You had other offers.”

Sean kissed the back of his neck and the edge of his shoulder blade, and Zach’s breath hitched and he pushed backward just to feel Sean’s curly pubic hair and his growing erection.

“Because I was ready to feel something important,” Sean murmured. “And that’s just how you looked at me.”

“Yes.” Zach’s hips started to undulate all on their own. “That’s exactly how I felt.”

Sean’s hands smoothed down his chest, stopping to tweak at his nipples and then centering at ground zero. “So,” he purred in Zach’s ear, “tell me about yourself.”

“Nungh….” Zach thrust into Sean’s fist, and Sean sighed.

“It’s a good thing this part of the convo has it going on,” he murmured, and then he proceeded to… well, just proceeded. He stroked Zach until he was crazy again, and then, boldly and without apology, propped Zach’s foot up so his bottom was accessible. His fingers, slick and probing, were a surprise at first, and Zach made a shocked sort of sound.